


Creation Story

by Kammy



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fantasy, Gen, Magical Realism, Reality Warping, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-03 22:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6630373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kammy/pseuds/Kammy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eto fishes a stray out of the bloody sewers underneath the Anteiku raid, and tells him her story on a whim.</p><p>The tale she tells is long and hard to believe, but it's not like Hide's going anywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etotakatsuki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etotakatsuki/gifts).



> Wow... it's been a while since I wrote anything besides femslash. 
> 
> This sucks but I wrote it and I wanted to do something with it, so, here we go. Hope someone enjoys this!

Hide wasn’t sure how long it was before he realized his face was gone, but it wasn’t a pleasant moment. It hit him like a jolt of electricity. His face was gone; he could feel its loss underneath the haze of stinging pain that prickled his nerves. He could feel the missing chunks right down to where the flesh had been scraped off his cheekbones. And his nose—it was broken, crushed, snapped right off.

He gasped, and tried to reach up. His hands were unresponsive. He jerked them again, trying to command his body but—

_Oh, that’s right._

One hand reached his face, at least. One. The other—well there was nothing left to respond. Tremblingly, he managed to drape his single hand over his face. Thick, rough cloth. Bandages. Some over one of his eyes. No, not over an eye. Over an empty eye socket.

He shook. His lungs heaved on their own, drawing in shallow, ragged breaths. He was moving, moving but—

“Stay still. You’ll reopen your wounds.”

But he couldn’t really listen or process the logic behind that. All he could do was react, like an empty shell animated by fear. He had to get away, he knew. He had to.

But there was something pinning him down immediately, strapping him in place. He could barely see. There was only a flash of bright white, and a blur of some sort of figure shadowing over him.

“Welcome to Aogiri, Nagachika Hideyoshi.”

 

* * *

 

He had no place to move and plenty of time to think, so think he did.

He thought about his injuries. From the little he could see of himself, he was missing an arm, and there were significant chunks torn out of his torso. There was skin torn off all over, but his face—as he’d realized at first—was mangled beyond repair. He knew how this had happened. Much as he tried to push it out of his mind, the thought surfaced back.

_Kaneki._

He thought about how he had survived. Honestly, he shouldn’t have. But there was something—tubes and wires stuck underneath his bandages right into his open wounds. Artificial veins, pumping something into him. A delicate, lengthy process of healing that likely involved some sort of valuable resources. And that could only mean one thing.

He was being saved. Someone important wanted him alive. Perhaps that was the most terrifying part of all this. He was required, and he didn’t know what for.

So he laid there, wrapped in nothing but bandages, thinking and thinking through all the pain.

 

* * *

 

 _Who is Kaneki to you?_ He could hear sometimes in his dreams.

“My best friend,” he answered eventually.

_And you followed him to the sewers?_

“I had to… he had to live.”

_What do you mean by that? What exactly did you do?_

 

* * *

 

He wasn’t an optimist, much as he had always tried to keep upbeat in the past. He didn’t fool himself into believing there was some sort of transcendental law in the universe that stated things must work out for the best, or that his efforts had to bring forth the results he desired. Still, as the days past in a miserable haze, he let himself latch onto some hope in his waking hours.

_Kaneki is alive._

_I have to find out what happened to him._

_I have to find him._

_I have to see him again._

And that was his one comfort through the length of all the hours that passed him by.

Because if it wasn’t true, then this—this pain and the wires that reached his guts and the chunks of flesh missing from his skins—was all for nothing.

 

* * *

 

_You’re a real person, aren’t you?_

“What?”

_I don’t remember creating you. But how strange that a real person would do that. And for him, as well._

“I don’t know what you mean.”

_Never mind. Rest. I’m going to have so much fun with you._

 

* * *

 

 _She_ started to visit him.

It was a sign that he was recovering, he realized much later. But at the time, he thought nothing of it because there was nothing to think. She was just there—suddenly speaking to him through the pain and the quiet hum of whatever machines he’d been hooked up to.

“How do you feel?” she would ask, and his heart sank to realize he had the voice that he had been hearing through his half-sleep. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you know what happened to you?”

But he wouldn’t answer—his throat was too dry, and he didn’t have the energy to speak. He would scarcely open his one remaining eye. Still, his thoughts raced. Was she the reason he was still here, alive?

Takizawa was in the building. He became aware of this one day because he recognized Takizawa’s voice from down the hall. But what he heard turned his stomach.

“You can’t make me eat that! Amon—Amon, help!”

And then, there were noises: crunching, the twisting of limbs, bones snapping, all against a background of screams.

Soon screaming wasn’t an uncommon sound in the place. He woke to it and fell asleep to it. Mostly it was far away, muffled across the halls outside the room he was confined to. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, things happened right outside his door.

“You’re getting better,” the woman who visited said one day. “Soon you’ll be able to move around a bit, and won’t that be nice? There’s a lot I have to tell you.”

Her fingers were cold as she laid them on his head. He didn’t have any hair left on his head, but she pet him gently. He flickered his remaining eye open and saw her, just a flash of a playful smirk and imperious green eyes looking down on him, brimming with glee.

It took him a while afterward to realize where he had seen her before.

_Takatsuki Sen._

 

* * *

 

He recovered, as she promised. Or at least—could he call it recovery? He was unhooked from all the machines and his organs and blood didn’t immediately spill out. He was unlatched from the table he’d been strapped to so it seemed there wasn’t much fear of him tearing open any stitches. His eyesight was dim but he could see a little out of his eye. Someone put him in a wheelchair, arranging him there like a limp doll.

Was this recovery—faceless, immobile, wheeled around like a toy, patched together and stitched up from broken parts for some unknown purpose?

A gray hallway passed him by. He was taken out of there, right into some other building that seemed adjoined. A warehouse? He couldn’t tell. He tried to turn to see who was guiding his wheelchair, but he didn’t even have the energy to turn his neck.

Then, a muffled noise emerged from the hall. Screaming. It was coming from the direction he was being wheeled in. He tensed, his single hand gripping the armrest of the wheelchair. It got louder.

He was moved right up to the room the screams were coming from, and he shut his eyes—and he was moved right past it, right into the room next to it. When the door closed behind him, he realized he was still shaking, blood pounding in his ears.

“Thank you, Kanou,” he heard a voice—the woman’s voice—say. “You may leave us now.”

“Of course,” another voice from behind said. “Have fun with him.”

Hide felt his insides lurch. The door opened and shut again behind him. There were tiny, soft footsteps and he felt the cool presence of someone leaning forward. A hand touched his face, and he flinched.

He could still hear the screams from the room beside him.

“There, there,” the woman said. “Why don’t you open your eyes? I won’t hurt you. You’re not strong enough.”

Sickening fear snaked through his gut at that, but Hide obeyed and opened his eyes. She was smiling at him, light dancing in her bright green eyes, bandages pooling around her neck. It was the clearest he had ever seen her face and she was unreally beautiful.

He was in what looked like a library, or maybe some kind of dumping ground for books: shelves and shelves of books stacked high to the ceiling, and books thrown into a pile right into the middle.

His mind traveled to years ago, when he’d been looking for Kaneki’s thrown-away books and found them—they had looked like that, hadn’t they? Piled like trash. But a soft tug at his face pulled him out of his memories.

“Let me see,” she said.

And then she was unwinding the bandages around his face. He flinched again, but suddenly he could feel air on his skin again—what was left at it. She took in the sight of him, and grinned.

“How lovely,” she said. “What a face you have now!”

He shivered as she trailed a finger softly over his raw, unhealed skin.

“I suppose there’s a lot you’re wondering about,” she said, removing her hand to sit down on a pile of books. “Let me tell you a few things. The Anteiku raid happened months ago. Do you remember that? You can speak, you know.”

Hide swallowed. “I… remember.”

The first thing he had said in months. His voice sounded different, felt different. Not like Nagachika Hideyoshi’s voice. The woman tsked at him and got up, returning in a second with a glass of water. She tilted his head back and pressed the glass to his lips. He didn’t have much of a choice, so he let the water slip down his throat, and gulped it down.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded.

“The Anteiku raid,” she continued, walking away to place the glass on a shelf. “There were heavy casualties on both sides. We found you in the sewer there, all mangled and chewed up like ghoul leftovers. Good thing I decided to take you in, huh?”

She was turning to him and grinning again, and he realized that she did not at all expect him to think it was a good thing.

“Your friend did quite a number on you,” she said. “How cruel of him.”

He twitched. So she knew about that. “What do you want from me?” he asked. “Why am I here?”

“Hm,” she said. “I don’t know yet.”

He blinked, incredulous. “You don’t know?”

“I’ll figure it out. I know I’ll use you for something,” she said lightly. “But first I want to know about you. You and dear little Kaneki.”

Hide opened his mouth, and closed it again. She laughed at him.

“Oh, are you afraid of telling me?” she asked. “How adorable.”

She walked around him, and he felt his pulse race in his ears again. He could still hear the screams next door, a grim reminder of his situation. She was going to the shelves, flipping through some titles, humming to herself.

“Would you like to?”

He would, but not from her. He could sense a lingering sadism under her words, like she’d twist the truth to hurt him if at all possible. But she was approaching again.

“Oh don’t worry,” Eto said. “You’ve already told me the basics. All those hours lying in bed, vulnerable to whatever drug Kanou had to filter into your system, and you think you wouldn’t babble out the answer to any question I asked you? You shouldn’t hold yourself back from speaking frankly here. Did you purposefully get him to devour you in the sewers?”

Hide hesitated. The screaming had died down, but still—it would be better to be compliant. There was nothing to be gained from lying, after all. “Yes.”

Eto clapped her hand, laughing. “How funny!” she said, and her expression reminded Hide of a child who had seen something particularly interesting at a puppet show. “Why?”

Hide sighed. “He was dying.”

Eto seemed to take a moment to digest this response.

“I remember you at the book signing,” she said. “Getting a book signed to him, of all people. And you’re a human too! Not just that, a _real_ human being.”

Hide blinked, unsure of what she meant. “Takatsuki Sen,” was all he said.

She grinned. “Call me Eto.”

She circled a pile of books and plopped down on it, resting her head in her hands, still looking at him as though figuring something out. Then, she snapped her fingers.

“I know,” she said. “Since you’re a real person, how about I tell you everything?”

“Everything?”

She waved her hands. “Ghouls, the CCG, the fabric of reality, and your dear Kaneki. And me,” she grinned, and tilted her head. “Wouldn’t you like to know the truth about this world?”

Like he would trust her to tell the truth, he thought inwardly. But he kept his face blank, like a student ready to listen to their teacher. “Yes,” he told her.

“Excellent!” she clapped her hands together again. “Let’s begin.”

It wasn’t possible, Hide thought, for there to be a breeze in this windowless room. Still, he could have sworn he felt one for a second, chilling the back of his neck. And it shouldn’t have been anyone to control the lighting or temperature of a room with just a thought, but as she grinned, everything dimmed and the air around them grew cold.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God damn this was terrible to write. ugh. I hope the struggle was worth it.

“When I lose a finger, it grows back. The flesh glows and the blood shimmers and they weave back together, good as new. You’ve seen it right? A ghoul regenerating?”

“That was my first memory, you know. My fingers growing back.”

 

* * *

* * *

  

It began with her hair, she knew because he—her guardian—told her later that it was the first thing she showed control over. Control—it was always about control. Her cut her hair, and it would grow back faster than it should. Because she wanted her hair long back then, she liked it that way—so it happened.

He cut off her fingers and told her she could make them grow back, that she should make them grow back. He told her to close her eyes and ignore the blood shooting out, to focus on them like they were there.

“Move your fingers,” he told her.

Had she been screaming, or crying? She had been young enough that all those details were now lost in a blur. What she recalled was her head pounding, eyes screwed shut, feeling the blood trickle down as she clutched pressed her stumpy hands to her chest, struggling to do as he said.

“Move them,” he said, voice ringing.

The bleeding stopped. She opened her eyes, and suddenly everything was mending itself, glowing as it did. She stretched out shining bone fingers, and flesh slowly wrapped around them.

“This is the power of God, the power that makes your imagination the only limit,” he told her. “And we must control it.”

* * *

 

Her room was small, and lined with bookshelves. There were no windows, but there were lamps.  There was a tiny bed pushed against the wall in between the shelves. She woke there every morning and fell asleep there every night. Her guardian—she stopped thinking of him as her father long afterward—tutored her there, taught her kanji along with basic mathematics and history. Everything she needed to know.

She left only to eat, and to prepare food with the man. She would bleed out corpses in tubs and he would have her drink the blood. They would chop up soft human limbs together, carefully take out the important parts and burn the entrails before eating them.

“To strengthen the power of God,” the man told her, “we must consume human flesh.”

It was all part of a ritual, and the man took it very seriously. She would give him the power of God, and he would give her everything in return, he told her. She didn’t question it. She was tiny and so, so young. She just cut where he told her and ate what he told her and let him peel off her own flesh when he told her. All for this ritual.

In addition, he taught her. Some things about magic and the power of human blood and flesh and rituals, but other things as well. All of human history, everything one needed to know about mankind. She learned about greed, hatred, fear, prejudice, love, compassion, connection—and sacrifice, the pinnacle of human action according to his words. There was a whole palette of human emotion outside of the walls of their house, where the sun never shone.

There were stories, and there was history. But Eto never cared for the difference between the two.

* * *

 

There was a story about a rabbit who gave its flesh to a stranger because it had nothing else to offer—a story of a god who threw himself into a fire so that his flesh would allow the world to continue living. She read them once, twice—and then she dreamt about them, thought about them during the hours of her study or when she was peeling flesh off of bone.

How strange—she thought when the man gave her these stories. How strange—she thought again, watching as the man peeled away flesh from corpses. How strange—she thought, the same way she thought about stories about weird things like jellyfish or the northern lights.

What sort of place did such a story have in this world?

She thought about it, and she dreamed. And one night, sitting up from such a dream, an idea struck her. She immediately got up and went to her desk, taking out one of the notebooks she wrote in because the man told her to take notes during his lectures. She tore out a single page—that should be enough for her story, her _own_ story.

She stayed up, writing furiously, filling up the front and the back of the page before falling asleep.

* * *

 

In the morning, there seemed to be less magic to it.

Her handwriting was sloppy—she could tell because the man who was raising her was strict about it. The wording wasn’t as enchanting as it had seemed to her when she’d first imagined it. Plus, the idea in general seemed trite, like she’d stolen it from one of her fairy tale books.

She tore it up, her first story. She tore it up and threw it in the trash and made herself forget about it as she went about with her daily lessons. When she went to bed, though, the idea rose in her again. She ignored it, but suddenly it was happening—her story, right before her eyes, emerging from the chaos of her dreams.

The story was on her desk again when she woke. She took it in her hands, not believing her own touch. She had torn it up, hadn’t she? Or had that been a dream?

This time, she burned it. She watched it go up in flames in her fireplace, make sure it turned to ashes. The next day, however, it was right back on her desk.

“The power of God,” the man who was raising her called it. “The power to change reality.”

She took the story and hid it under her bed.

* * *

 

She didn’t know when she started hating the man. Was there a particular time? There was so much to hate him for, when she looked back on it. And yet—and yet—loathsome as she was to admit it, she had not hated him at first.

Her teacher, the one who gave her words and stories and the histories of people. The one who brushed her hair delicately and stayed up late to tend to her when her stomach ached. Her guardian. Her father. Her most important person. Her _only_ person.

Perhaps it was when he started to cut off her fingers daily, a punishment.

What had she done? Something wrong. She knew it was something. But she didn’t care to remember. It was trivial, she was sure. Control—it was always about control. She was supposed to obey, and obey better and obey quicker.

“You must control yourself,” he said. “And do as you’re told. Otherwise, the power will be wasted.”

She didn’t care to dredge up these old memories—doing that would only give them more power.

Either way, she started to hate him.

She didn’t have to be hurt, she realized. He was the one that decided that. He was the one who kept talking about the ritual. If he would just go away…

Her fingers started to grow back faster each time. In the meantime, she realized she had nothing—no weapons to defend herself, no way to fight back. He might as well have been God. She would bury herself in her covers, gripping her mattress, smothering her rage so she was hurt less.

With the use of her fingers in the evening, she wrote another story.

It was about a man, a good man. This man was tall and strong. He didn’t have a face, not a real one, but he ate with a huge mouth on an extra limb that came from his back. Still, he was kind. He wore a mask with a giant smile to show he was kind, since he couldn’t make happy faces. He went to houses where parents beat their children, and killed them. His giant mouth gobbled them right up, and then he let the children be free.

She didn’t burn this story. Instead, she drew the man on the back of the paper, hid it under her pillow, and dreamed.

* * *

 

She didn’t remember much about the man. She had erased what she could, only letting herself remember the bare amount so she knew where she came from. His name and face were lost to her, and good riddance to that. But she remembered that last conversation.

“It’s time you knew,” he said. “To unleash the power of God, you will have to die.”

She hadn’t intended to listen to him that day, but this jolted her out of her silence. She didn’t want to die.

“It is the sacrifice that first created the world—and can recreate it. I have prepared you for this.”

And he had, she realized—this was this point, the truth behind the story about the rabbit and the sacrificial god. The place of those stories in this world—her place. This was what he wanted, for her to lay down her life for this ritual. To die and give him the power of god.

She had burned inside, scorching with fire. But she couldn’t speak up. She was so small, and he was so powerful.

“You should accept this,” he told her at first. “If you do not do this, you will be unloved.”

But she said nothing.

“If you do not do this,” he told her then. “You will have no future.”

Nothing.

“If you do not do this,” he told her finally. “Your life will be unbearable—I’ll make sure of it.”

In the end, he was a pathetic person who fell back on force, even if he did hide behind a cold voice and a face of stone.

It was her or him. She realized this with a terrible clarity that shot through her veins like lightning. Her or him—and he had the advantage of height and weight and knives. And he wouldn’t be stopped, was already reaching for those knives, telling her to stay put like she had in the past. Her blood for the ritual. Her flesh for the power of God.

She could remember the moment she covered her ears, and screamed with rage.

It was hard to remember when the knock came. A knock on the door—but there was no door in that room, no door leading outside at least. Still, the knock came (like in the story, just like in the story).

And the man with the smiling mask let himself in, just like she had written. She watched as he cracked the skull of the man who raised her, crushing him against the wall and tearing him limb from limb. He didn’t bleed the corpse out like she was used to—he just gobbled it up, clothing and all.

She watched. Everything was so fast and hurried, guts blooming like red flowers over the stone floor.. Her heart raced inside her, and her mouth dropped open—but it was just another corpse now, wasn’t it? Just like all the ones she’d helped dismember. Just like that.

And it was her or him, after all.

At the end of it all, the man turned to her, crouching down and hold out his hand gently. She stared a moment, incredulous.

“Noro,” she said.

Her creation. The second story she’d ever written. She ran to him and his head was twisting at her like it wasn’t attached to his neck. But he held out his arms to her, and that was enough.

The stains of where her guardian had just been were still there, and her head reeled a little. She didn’t have to tell Noro she wanted to go. He knew immediately, and he lifted her up and took her away. Not to the next room, but outside.

She saw the sun for the first time, that day.

She was about eight years old.

 

* * *

* * *

 

Hide looked at her, blinking. Did the room seem lighter all of a sudden? Thoughtlessly, he opened his mouth.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Noro,” he said.

“Have you heard of him?” she asked.

He could remember the reports: a tall, fearsome ghoul who sometimes wandered about harmlessly and other times tore apart investigators by the dozens. Always silent. Always hidden behind a grimacing mask. Noro.

“He’s falling apart at the seams now, like an old child’s ragdoll. But he hangs around, making himself useful,” she said. “He was a flawed creation to begin with. Empty, listless, terrible fictional even for a character. I wrote him to enjoy clocks a while back simply because he needed something.”

Hide didn’t say anything, and she tilted her head at him.

“You haven’t told me I’m lying or crazy yet,” she said. “Aren’t you going to?”

He twitched involuntarily—she saw it, he knew she saw it, but he made himself not mind. She was looking at him, eyes gleaming—what did she want from him? The truth? Like he would actually tell some heavily delusional, powerful ghoul that her story was bullshit. Even if it was true.

…unless, she _wanted_ him to say that.

She looked thrilled as she watched him, like something about his expressions were incredibly amusing. Was his nervousness showing that easily?

“Why would I say that?” he asked.

“Be honest,” she said. “Isn’t that what people would normally say to hearing something that couldn’t possibly be true, for all they know?”

“I suppose,” Hide said, figuring that was enough.

“So,” she said, “What do you think?”

Well, wasn’t _that_ a terrific and not at all loaded conversation starter. What did he think—well, obviously she was lying through her teeth. There was no way she believed any of this. She was an author. She made shit like this up for a living. He had read her books and the imagery was blatantly similar. And anyway—

People didn’t talk about their pasts like this. Not with these sorts of polished phrases. They didn’t talk about having their parent cut their fingers off while smiling and rolling the words out on their tongue as though they were savoring just how _beautiful_ the way they had phrased it was. They stuttered, they blurted inelegant excuses and half-truths. They turned their eyes away and touched their chin…

Hide stopped thinking, his chest suddenly heavy and painful.

 _She’s lying._ Well that was obvious. But why was she lying—what sort of reaction would appease her? Did she want him to be taken in by this? Was this a test? What would happen if he wasn’t—wasn’t _fun_ enough…?

She snapped her fingers. His eyes flicked up, panicked.

“Hey, drifting off a bit?” she asked playfully, before her tone went flat. “Well time’s up. Answer.”

“I don’t see why you’d tell all this to me,” he said. “I mean, I’m not exactly the most important, uh… audience?”

Honest, but cautious. He hoped that was enough. But—oh there was something going dull in her eyes. She thought that was boring. Oh no. He had to add something.

“Also,” he said quickly, “What was the first story you wrote? The one that kept coming back? Did you just forget it because it was so long ago? And—why didn’t anything from that story come back alive?”

That seemed to do better. Her lips lifted in a smirk, but she didn’t say anything. Of course, Hide realized, she was a writer. She was like Kaneki when he had written a story back in his first year of high school and he’d shown it to Hide with big, hopeful eyes. She wanted be asked questions, she wanted to explain herself. Encouraged, Hide continued.

“Did it have something to do with the story about the rabbit?”

Her smirk widened. “You’ll see,” she told him. “For now, would you like to hear more?”

The air was still cold, and Hide’s throat was feeling dry again. He swallowed. “Yeah. Let’s hear it.”

Everything seemed to get dimmer and colder again—was he imagining it? Either way, she didn’t get dimmer. Instead she stood out in the darkness, clear as ever.

She grinned, and he let himself focus on that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pay attention to meeeeeeee

**Author's Note:**

> There will be more chapters. Not sure how many more but... more.


End file.
